However, Roman citizens, authors, writers, playwrights, and poets, like Cicero and Vergil, did create the more complicated forms that we see in written Latin: they added constructions, conjugations, and declensions to deal with more complicated ways of dealing with information in time and space. The authors needed to add all those strange tenses with the strange-sounding names, to convey ideas more complicated than the street lingo could handle.
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Agree with part of the above. Writers described, categorized, and gave names to things like cases of nouns, and moods and tenses and moods of verbs. Unwritten languages can be quite complicated, and in some cases certain aspects of language get simpler as time goes on. It is believed that Indo-European had eight cases for nouns; Latin has five, German four. In English we have lost cases of nouns completely and rely more on word order and prepositions. Subject, object, and possessive could be thought of as three cases of pronouns.
Latin was one of several languages spoken in the Italian peninsula when Rome was on its way to being a world power. It's part of the great Indo-European family of languages which included German and all the Germanic languages (including English), Russian and the other Slavic tongues, Celtic languages and the Aryan languages of India, such as Sanskrit.
Originally, Latin was the language of the inhabitants of Latium, the region of Italy that included the city of Rome. Later, as Roman influence spread, Latin became the language first of Italy and then of much of the continent of Europe. The Romance languages, descended from Latin, are still spoken in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Romania (not to mention parts of Africa and the Americas that were colonized by Romance speakers).
The earliest archaic Latin was originally an unimportant prehistoric regional dialect spoken in a very small area of ancient Italy, one of many different tribal languages in that area including Etruscan, Ligurian, Oscan, Umbrian, Picene, Sabine, Sabellic, Messapic and even a form of Greek. These were all Indo-European languages except for Etruscan; the Etruscans then conquered most of Italy, bringing their own non-Indo-European language to the entire region.
Etruscan kings ruled in Rome from the end of the 7th century BC until 509 BC when the Roman Republic was established; during this period both the Etruscan language and an archaic form of Latin would have been spoken in the city.
As Rome's power and influence grew, its language spread first across Italy and then throughout all its conquered territories. Latin had absorbed many words of Etruscan and the other Italian dialects, so it was already a bit of a mixture and it continued to absorb foreign words as it spread.
Archaic Latin had Greek-looking word endings like -os and -om, which became -us and -um in classical Latin. The element ex was originally pronounced more like egs, gradually changing to eks - this explains why the genitive of rex is regis.
Latin was heavily introduced into Anglo-Saxon after the Norman invasion in 1066, where French, a Romance language, replaced English as the language of the government. Latin also became the primary language of the clergy, meaning many words slowly were replaced over a 200 year period.
English, however, still remains a primarily Germanic language.
The Latin language was started/created by the Romans.
Latin is a member of the Italo-Celtic branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which probably originated in northern Eurasia.
Nobody knows, but the earliest Latin records are from the first century BCE.
Latin was not created. It evolved over thousands of years from older languages.
Early Romans, Hebrews and Greeks
The Phoenicians - through Greek and LAtin, it is the basis of today's alphabets.
The Hebrews developed the Hebrew alphabet.The Greeks developed the Greek alphabet.The Romans developed the Latin alphabet.
The Phoenicians
Alphabets only have 1 or 2 cases. Latin, Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic have upper and lower cases. Hebrew and Arabic have only one case.
The EgyptiansThe Nubians
There is no ancient people that did this. While the Phoenicians developed an alphabet that gave rise to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the Phoenician alphabet is not still in use today.
In the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, ALL OTHER LETTERS come after the letter A.
It became the basis for the Greek and Latin alphabets, and so today's alphabets.
Here are 4 types of phonetic writing systems:Pure Alphabets (consonants and vowels) such as Greek, Latin, Korean or CyrillicAbjads (consonants only) such as Hebrew and ArabicAbugidas such as Hindi and ThaiSyllabaries, such as Japanese katakana
There are complete alphabets (like Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic).There are abjads (alphabets with only consonants, such as Hebrew)There are abugidas, which are segmental writing systems in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unitThere are syllabaries (alphabet-like symbols that represent whole syllables, like Japanese katakana).
No they did not.The Phoenicians invented alphabetic writing.Hebrew borrowed (and modified) the Phoenician alphabet.The Greeks borrowed it from Hebrew.The Romans borrowed it from the Greeks.
It formed the basis of the Greek and Latin alphabets, and so the alphabets of today.